It’s time for Summernats to be axed for good
Jan 9th, 2008 by Rebecca
It’s that time of year again: Summernats.
Every January, this usually safe city gets taken over for a week or so for what essentially amounts to a festival for car hoons. It’s supposed to be a car festival, but - as it has every other year - it winds up being less about cars and more a festival of alcohol-fuelled misogyny. It’s the one week of the year where it really isn’t safe to be walking around alone at night in what is otherwise a pretty safe place to live.
And once again, it hasn’t passed without trouble. According to the Canberra Times, a drunken mob of 30 or 40 men were running around the Exhibition Park venue on Saturday night demanding women festivalgoers take off their tops, bashing on cars demanding people do burnouts, and generally looking for a fight. ACT Minister for Women Katy Gallagher and federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick have both suggested that the event organisers could face legal action, but considering that Summernats organiser Chic Henry oh-so-charmingly called it “a crowd celebration”, it’s pretty clear that they don’t give a damn.
The fact that Summernats is still being held here in its current form - and supported by taxpayer dollars, no less, is a disgrace. Calls for a ban on alcohol sales at the site have been rejected out of sight by the organisers, and Opposition Leader Zed Seselja’s calls for a lifetime ban from the festival for troublemakers appear to have also fallen on deaf ears. It’s pretty damn clear that the Summernats organisers won’t clean up their act on their own, and it just isn’t good enough that the ACT Government keeps forking over dough to drive the tourism dollars. It’s time Summernats was canned - and permanently, too.